90 research outputs found
Dataset: Reaney et al. Information about foot care provided to people with diabetes with or without their partners
No full textDataset from Reaney et al. Information about foot care provided to people with diabetes with or without their partners: Impact on recommended foot care behavior
Foot care, ‘spousal’ support and type 2 diabetes: an exploratory qualitative study
No full textObjectives: People with type 2 diabetes (T2DM) should check their feet and
protect them against harm, but few do. Living with a spouse contributes to
good foot care behaviour. This study explores awareness, perceived susceptibility
of, and concern about, foot problems, and reported foot care behaviour,
and ways in which a spouse may or may not contribute to foot care in
T2DM.
Methods: 1:1 interviews were conducted with 6 individuals with T2DM. Half
had a spouse half did not. There was one person at low, medium and high
risk in each sample. Each spouse participated in a separate interview, and the
dyads were interviewed together. Interviews were analysed using Applied
Thematic Analysis.
Results: All participants knew that diabetes was associated with foot problems.
Not all people with T2DM thought that they were susceptible; spouses
perceived greater susceptibility for the patient. This was unrelated to risk
level. Most people with T2DM and all spouses engaged in behaviour to identify
problems or protect feet, but rarely both. Spouses’ attitude and behaviour
did influence the patients’ own behaviour. At times spouse support was perceived
positively, and at times negatively.
Conclusion: Engaging spouses in foot care education may improve foot care
behaviour
Regionalism in the Operas of John Beckwith and James Reaney
No full textRegionalism is the cultural trend in which the idiosyncrasies of a given region, and their influence on human lives, social structures, and cultural development, are explored and expressed through an artistic medium. This trend emerged in Canadian literature in the 1920’s and 30’s, and experienced a resurgence in prominence in the 1970’s. However, the significance of regionalism in Canadian art music remains virtually unexplored. The purpose of this study is to explore the concept of regionalism in the four Beckwith/Reaney operas: Night Blooming Cereus (1959), The Shivaree (1982), Crazy to Kill (1989), and Taptoo! (2003). The author extrapolates from a literary understanding of regionalism to create a framework of analysis for these four musical works. Beckwith and Reaney employed regionalism as a vehicle for innovation within the operatic form, and exploited the tension between European operatic norms and authentic portrayals of life in rural Ontario with these works. The concluding chapter situates these operas within the context of the twentieth-century Canadian opera marketplace through an examination of composition and performance history, and examines the influence of regionalism on their critical and popular reception.D.M.A
Push from the author [Review the book "The Boy with an 'R' in His Hand" by James Reaney]
No full text
Modelling runoff generation and connectivity for semi-arid hillslopes and small catchments
No full textThe processes relating to runoff generation in a semi-arid environment at the hillslope scale are poorly understood. This research considers the amount and origin of water reaching the channel during a storm event using a combination of field experiments and computer simulation techniques.
From the field experiments, it was found that the key controls on runoff generation at the point scale are the surface cover of rock fragments, vegetation cover, slope gradient and surface roughness. The effect of land management was found to be greater than geology.
The simulation modelling work investigated the controls on runoff generation at the hillslope and small catchment scales. It was found that the storm characteristics are far more important than surface properties in determining the amount of discharge from a slope. The temporal fragmentation of the rainfall was found to control the distribution of flow path lengths and hence the amount of discharge leaving a slope. The key surface controls on the form of the discharge hydrograph are slope length, slope gradient and the hydrological properties at the base of the slope.
The origin of runoff was investigated using autonomous software agents able to trace the flow of water through a catchment. This technique is able to give a unique picture of the origin of runoff within a catchment. It was shown that the spatial pattern of the origin of runoff is complex and varies significantly between catchments.
This research has shown that there are two key themes in determining the amount of runoff reaching the channel network: the interplay between the distribution of flow path lengths generated during a storm and the distributions of flow lengths to the channel as a function of the landscape. The second theme relates to the importance of the spatial structure of hydrological areas within the landscape
Diversity and Evolution of Cyclic Peptides in Flax (Linum usitatissimum L.)
No full textPlants produce a myriad of compounds in response to various survival challenges. One novel family of natural products are the ribosomally-synthesized cyclic peptides (CPs). They are derived from precursor proteins undergoing post-translational modification (PTM). Potentially acting as defense agents in plants, CPs have various bioactivities for agricultural and pharmaceutical applications. While thousands of CPs have been discovered across multiple plant families over the past decades, limited attention has been paid to their evolution in plants. Here, my thesis begins with a literature review on plant CPs evolution. In brief, plant CPs exhibit 3 types of evolution, namely convergent evolution of the cyclized backbone, parallel evolution of the biosynthetic pathway and divergent evolution of the CP sequences. The increasing application of genome mining to the discovery of new CPs inspired me to explore the diversity of linusorbs, the orbitide class of CPs in cultivated flax (Linum usitatissimum L.).
The first chapter reports my genome mining work using a profile-based approach. The previously found linusorb molecules are derived from 11 unique domains in 5 precursor proteins. Each linusorb domain is flanked by conserved residues, and the entire linusorb-embedded unit is repetitive in most precursor proteins. Based on this pattern I developed profiles to search the reannotated flax genome assembly, and identified 25 novel proteins each containing multiple profile-matching repeats embedded with linusorb-like domains (LLDs). This customized, profile-based mining approach has the advantage of finding unrelated proteins containing putative linusorbs, revealing their potential diversity in the flax genome.
The second chapter analyzes the duplication patterns of these repeats. The gene sequences extracted from genome assembly were first verified by Sanger sequencing. Misassembly of Illumina reads were widely found in the repeat regions of these genes. Pairwise alignment of the corrected and reannotated gene sequences identified 8 groups of paralogues. Examination of repeats based on pairwise similarity discerned 3 modes of tandem duplication differing in the number of repeats as a unit. The significantly lower similarities of repeats across paralogues than within suggested repeat divergence after ancestral gene duplication. The flanking non-repetitive regions also indicated functional divergence across the paralogues.
II
The third chapter investigated the evolution of linusorbs. Both linusorbs and LLDs are moderately hydrophobic in contrast with the hydrophilic spacers. The unexpected predominance of conserved flanking signatures among the LLDs indicated their significant role in PTM and parallel evolution of the processing pathway. The LLD-containing repeats across paralogues are less similar than those within paralogues but more similar than those across non-paralogues, suggesting adaptive evolution of the paralogues. Positive selection was detected to episodically act on repeats within and across protein paralogues. Collectively, linusorb evolution in the flax genome is best described as a multifaceted model of adaptation. These findings in the diversity and evolution of CPs in flax lay a foundation for future studies on the functions and applications of these natural products
Diversity and Evolution of Cyclic Peptides in Flax (Linum usitatissimum L.)
No full textPlants produce a myriad of compounds in response to various survival challenges. One novel family of natural products are the ribosomally-synthesized cyclic peptides (CPs). They are derived from precursor proteins undergoing post-translational modification (PTM). Potentially acting as defense agents in plants, CPs have various bioactivities for agricultural and pharmaceutical applications. While thousands of CPs have been discovered across multiple plant families over the past decades, limited attention has been paid to their evolution in plants. Here, my thesis begins with a literature review on plant CPs evolution. In brief, plant CPs exhibit 3 types of evolution, namely convergent evolution of the cyclized backbone, parallel evolution of the biosynthetic pathway and divergent evolution of the CP sequences. The increasing application of genome mining to the discovery of new CPs inspired me to explore the diversity of linusorbs, the orbitide class of CPs in cultivated flax (Linum usitatissimum L.).
The first chapter reports my genome mining work using a profile-based approach. The previously found linusorb molecules are derived from 11 unique domains in 5 precursor proteins. Each linusorb domain is flanked by conserved residues, and the entire linusorb-embedded unit is repetitive in most precursor proteins. Based on this pattern I developed profiles to search the reannotated flax genome assembly, and identified 25 novel proteins each containing multiple profile-matching repeats embedded with linusorb-like domains (LLDs). This customized, profile-based mining approach has the advantage of finding unrelated proteins containing putative linusorbs, revealing their potential diversity in the flax genome.
The second chapter analyzes the duplication patterns of these repeats. The gene sequences extracted from genome assembly were first verified by Sanger sequencing. Misassembly of Illumina reads were widely found in the repeat regions of these genes. Pairwise alignment of the corrected and reannotated gene sequences identified 8 groups of paralogues. Examination of repeats based on pairwise similarity discerned 3 modes of tandem duplication differing in the number of repeats as a unit. The significantly lower similarities of repeats across paralogues than within suggested repeat divergence after ancestral gene duplication. The flanking non-repetitive regions also indicated functional divergence across the paralogues.
II
The third chapter investigated the evolution of linusorbs. Both linusorbs and LLDs are moderately hydrophobic in contrast with the hydrophilic spacers. The unexpected predominance of conserved flanking signatures among the LLDs indicated their significant role in PTM and parallel evolution of the processing pathway. The LLD-containing repeats across paralogues are less similar than those within paralogues but more similar than those across non-paralogues, suggesting adaptive evolution of the paralogues. Positive selection was detected to episodically act on repeats within and across protein paralogues. Collectively, linusorb evolution in the flax genome is best described as a multifaceted model of adaptation. These findings in the diversity and evolution of CPs in flax lay a foundation for future studies on the functions and applications of these natural products
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